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Before Claire Ranit spoke to her local Rotary Club, she needed to know if her listeners would be elephants or riders.

Ranit, MARC project director for the Columbia River Gorge, was referring to a model of behavioral psychology outlined by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. In Haidt’s metaphor the conscious mind is a rider on the back of an elephant, while the elephant galumphs along on instinct and impulse.

“The elephant is a big, powerful animal—the emotional side of things,” Ranit explains. “The rider is the analytical piece that makes decisions and guides the elephant where it needs to go.”

December 27, 2016 – The Mayor’s Office of Community Empowerment and Opportunity recently held a training session on trauma-informed practices and adversity for Philadelphia city employees. Led by the Health Federation of Philadelphia (HFP), the training recognized the impact of trauma on organizations, employees and the importance of caring for the caregivers.

The Collaborative is pleased to share three policy briefs on the impact of ACEs in the health, justice, and education systems including promising practices and recommended actions for change. These briefs were developed by members of the Illinois ACEs Response Collaborative—system leaders in Illinois who are working from an ACEs-informed lens to improve systems to prevent and mitigate trauma across generations.

They began with a song and ended with a poem. In-between, there were photographs and giant graphic renderings, movement exercises and a “human pulse” formed when 90 people stood in a circle and squeezed each other’s hands.

At a June summit in Whatcom County, Washington, titled “Our Resilient Community: A Community Conversation on Resilience and Equity,” the arts played a starring role.

Kristi Slette, executive director of the Whatcom Family and Community Network, one of two Washington sites participating in the Mobilizing Action for Resilient Communities (MARC) project, says the arts—music, dance, sculpture, storytelling—can help audiences understand trauma, resilience and hope in a visceral way.

“When the research and the data don’t pull you in, interacting with the arts communicates with people in a way they’re open to,” she says. “It extends our reach.”

The owner of the biggest construction firm in Walla Walla, Washington, sat through a February 2013 seminar that framed adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in ways a business person could understand: how childhood trauma could translate into low productivity, high turnover, sinking morale and rising health care costs.

The top cause of on-the-job injury at the construction firm was substance abuse by young male workers. Suddenly, the dots connected. The owner leaned toward Teri Barila, co-founder of the Children’s Resilience Initiative, and said, “Now I know what you’ve been trying to tell us.”

Santa Rosa, CA – October 25, 2016 – The Sonoma County Department of Health Services (DHS) announces the start of an Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) & Resiliency Fellowship that will train 25 community members to serve our county as community educators.

Responding to the overwhelming demand of funders in the Delaware Valley to better understand the impacts of trauma on our region and how they can apply trauma informed practices to their own work, Philanthropy Network Greater Philadelphia, the Thomas Scattergood Behavioral Health Foundation, and United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey partnered to produce Trauma-Informed Philanthropy: A Funder's Resource Guide for Supporting Trauma-Informed Practice in the Delaware Valley.

Two years ago, Kansas City Police Captain Darren Ivey had never heard of secondary trauma. But he could see how the relentless stress of police work chewed away at the personal lives of officers.

“What I started seeing was…how many department members had attempted suicide, how many domestic violence calls we responded to on our own people, how many DUI calls,” he said. “We’ve been told to suck it up, and it’s killing us.”

That’s why Ivey was eager to work with members of his own department, Truman Medical Center, and Trauma Matters Kansas City (TMKC) to develop a training on trauma and resilience for first responders. Ivey now sits on the Steering Committee for Resilient KC, a partnership between TMKC and the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce that aims to build a healthy and resilient community...This spring, he took part in a two-day First Responders Summit in Tarpon Springs, Florida—a half-day session hosted by Peace4Tarpon at St. Petersburg College that reached participants from 28 different agencies including 911 dispatch, police, fire and corrections, followed by a smaller, more in-depth training.

Hearing From Everyone on Health

With Mount Adams in Washington to the north and Mount Hood in Oregon to the south, the windy Columbia River Gorge boasts ideal conditions for kite surfers and sailors. High-tech companies have moved into new waterfront buildings up and down the river, joining tourism and agriculture as the area’s main economic engines.

The Health Federation of Philadelphia serves as a keystone supporting a network of Community Health Centers as well as the broader base of public and private-sector organizations that deliver health and human services to vulnerable populations.